Beauticians now come home on tap but are they safe in a strange place?

Online beauty services industry is nascent and no alarming incidents have made headlinesET Bureau | February 03, 2016, 08:33 IST

By Ipsita Basu

The beauty-services-at-home segment is witnessing a surge in the city with several startups delivering beauticians at your doorsteps. But what does it mean for the women who routinely have to venture into strangers' homes?

How is their safety ensured?

The services industry is focussed on customers but startups should equally worry about the safety of their women employees as well, says Pravin Agarwal, cofounder and CEO of BetterPlace Safety Solutions, which creates safety profiles based on personal, professional and social data.

The online beauty services industry is nascent and no alarming incidents have made headlines. But given how it works--you tap the app for a facial and they send home a beautician, almost always a woman--cauttion is paramount, say experts.

One way startups are going about this is through customer-profiling, which Agarwal recommends along with training on safety rights and providing SOS technology .

LocalOye, a mobile marketplace connecting customers with professionals such as wedding planners, yoga teachers and beauticians, uses data to identify genuine customers. StayGlad said it conducts background checks on its customers.

Aditya Rao, founder and CEO of LocalOye, said the firm stays in constant touch with woman staffers through a service call, has an escalation team to handle emergencies and is set to introduce panic buttons in its employee tracking app.

"We have yet not come across an incident wherein any of the parties have misbehaved," says Rao.

Bengaluru-based StayGlad provides transport and allows its beauticians "to cancel a service if they feel threatened in any way," says cofounder Kavish Desai.

"We have an internal app for our staffers where they can press an SOS button if the need arises."

To gain a first-person experience, this reporter booked a service from an on-demand beauty services startup.

The signup happened through a social media platform that had a picture and other basic information of the customer but there was no phone verification done by the company for customer credentials.

Once the beautician entered the house, there was just one confirmation call from the company on her cellphone. For the next 90 minutes, there was no followup.

Prodded on the safety options provided by her employer, the woman said, "We are asked to call the office or have the option of saying no if we are uncomfortable."

Towards the end of the service, she pulled out a device that she said was provided by her company recently with built-in SOS numbers. There was, however, no way of verifying how it worked. The device had not been charged.